Blueberry Somersaults
by apollonialust
Summary: Teenagers fall in love on the cusp of summer, but things seems to get a little complicated.


(A Fist Full of Letters)

It started off with a letter, folded neatly as if the messenger was a obsessive compulsive and the slightest hindrance would have left them writhing in panic. Maybe that's extreme, but the letter sat at her desk like a lovesick puppy, pleading and maybe a little embarrassing. As if she were a thief, she cupped the letter inside her hand, jamming it inside her pocket. She was frightened. She ran all the way home.

Her hometown was much like every little town. A suffocating prejudice and girls that just wanted to be famous. It had nothing to lose and didn't offer much either.

/

/

The letter was tucked in the back of her denim overalls that hung loosely on her slim body. The delicate violence of The Bluest Eye left her in a rapture, her lavender painted toes curled in the grass. Her nose tucked closely inside the faded pages. She purchased the book at a yard sale. The tale was in itself a morbid fairytale of a little black girl who wished for blue eyes. Pecola Breedlove wished for the evidence that God could exist if he would just give her those blue eyes. Olivia understood the longing, the longing for memories that were far off in her brain in a secret place. She'd have to get to them. She was like Pecola Breedlove pleading something that would never come.

The sticky blueberry jam drips down her index finger and she licks it clean off. The flavor makes her taste buds swoon. She smiles thanking God for the jam makers of the world. It would seem odd an 18 year old girl stuffing jam into her mouth. Maybe she'll be a writer or do something even more dangerous like fall in love, because that's dangerous, right. Taking away all the most vulnerable pieces and giving them away, that's fucking reckless.

Olivia's eyes poured over the pages in a silent rage she couldn't believe such aching tragedy, forever left in the spine of book, no one could take this away. It was left with the gods of some literary heaven. She had swallowed books whole kept them on her fingertips or the length of her arms to read over and over again. It was obsessive, but her brain didn't beckon silence it was in an orbit that lacked the scrutiny of laziness. She walked away from fairytales a long time ago needing something somber she could cling to, because it all ended so sickeningly the same. The girl meets guy and they fall in love, it's a toxic cocktail of dependency, jealousy and whatever kind of lust you could imagine, but it wasn't love. Love didn't look like blonde hair men on galloping horses saving repressed girls with tangled long hair. At least, not to Olivia. There had to be more, something that was beating like a hostile heart.

She thought of the letter snug and searing in her pocket. Fitzgerald had done a mischievous thing he was absolutely wrecking havoc on her heartstrings. This sort of thing did not happen to her. She was the written cliché in a thousand books, not nearly noisy enough for anyone to pay attention to her; she left her bangs to fall into the cliff of books but there was intelligence wild beneath her quiet exterior. She was the conventional beauty of stale poetry left in high school lockers. Her eyes could tell you a secret, she had myths in her bright brown skin that could paint a thousand metaphors, she was enough for the waves of the universe, but Olivia was still just a girl in the lazy pale spring of Eatonton. She didn't do boys or anyone else in particular. It was easier that way, not letting anyone in. She doesn't want anyone disturbing the mysteries inside of her, but Fitzgerald Grant is different that is the startling thing. It shouldn't be a boy that makes her unclasp the hidden fragilities she's so delicately kept close to her heart, but she's thinking of this in a strangely heroic way. It isn't fair and it makes her less than herself as if she is this other earthling that giggles, blushes and sighs at the whim of any guy's voice. This isn't her and that makes her so desperately scared.

Yet she couldn't stop the smile that curved her lips, he left the note in British Literature. There had to be some irony to this. His words opened up magical parts of her she didn't know existed. That's such a funny thing for her to feel, this kind of butterflies ravaging her ribcage instance. Those parts scared her they forced her to feel something, feel something besides the aching bleeding bullshit that she had succumbed to. Fitz is beautiful she will admit that to herself. She had never thought of any guy as beautiful, handsome of course but it's kind of like she saw the quiet sensitivity in his tender blue eyes, blue eyes that reminded her of the beginning of summer, hands frozen by sticky popsicles and the heat unbearable. He was sarcastic and humorous and he made her laugh so hard. Whenever he opened his mouth the most distinct cynical rhapsody would pour out. He wasn't a class clown per se, he just knew how to make her laugh without every uttering a word to her. There was that part of her that knew inside of him was a raging pain also, only he didn't run away from it. He carried it in his vocal cords. Isn't it perfect, the dreamboat of a guy frolics around through classes with an acoustic guitar? It's so mindlessly mawkish, his voice the bloodied sincerity of it, the curly heaps of chestnut hair on his head. They were both completely young adult romance books fodder. Only he had never said a word and she had never said a word to him, because they existed in the puzzle of two worlds, she the scapegoat of a loner's paradise and him the privileged outsider with very weird opinions. He never spoke word to her, but the neatly folded letter found itself on her desk.

/

The lazy damp heat broke her skin out in a dewy sweat. She wiped it away pulling the crumbled letter out of her pocket, she's so careful in opening it as if the slightest whiff of wind would cause it to perish leaving a blending sonnet of the world. It is her secret pleasure to have this thin blue lined sheet ripped from a notebook, the edges frayed. The words literally leave her breathless for the hundredth time, the slant ribbon of his handwriting. She's tracing the words with her fingertips. This isn't her. She doesn't fawn over Pablo Nerada inspired poetry of teenage boys. Maybe she never really knew herself and this was all just a shattering of the shards of hard glass that kept her together. She read as if her eyes are crying.

 _To Olivia,_

" _You're this mystery I can't really get over, the puzzle that is too much for me to decipher, does that sound barbaric to you? Maybe you aren't any of those things. Let me make it simple this is so embarrassing and rushed of me, but I've thought of the beauty of your face a million times._

 _It rocks me to sleep._

 _No, that doesn't sound right, you are wonderful_

 _I'm just asking for a second to talk to you about the universe or whatever leaves your lips_

 _I haven't had the courage to talk to you because that sort of thing is better suited for guys with bravado and loquaciousness._

 _These are my words they aren't sacred or biblical just words. Do what you want with them._

 _I am confessing. I like you Olivia Pope._

 _Fitz_

Her heart becomes something else, something alien, something confused. She smashes the paper to her chest, it's such a dramatic thing to do. It's very unlike her. It's very, " _writing the letters of his name on all her notebooks, trees carved with their names in scribbled tenacity. It is kissing in the tree and every possible sugar pop teenage romantic inclination_." She thinks her bones are probably made of cotton candy now. He likes her she cannot get over this little indulgence, the reprieve from her hurricane loneliness.

/

There are footsteps coming towards her, not quickly but rather sure in their pursuit. She clumsily stuffs the letter back into her pocket. She fumbles for the book left melting in the grass. Before Olivia can even resume her allusion of normal. She looks up eyes alarmed but flustered. He's in front of her, nearly towering. The honey wood smell of his body is overwhelming, his hands are in his pocket and it's his smile that makes her heart smitten, swoon, rip apart. He's boyish and she thinks it could be easy. His smile leaves her reeling blushing the makeup of a clown, and she let's herself smile her lips twisted into a daze of unrepentant delight. Fitzgerald Grant, the fucking teen dream.

He says very casually. " I'm not a stalker. I don't know how this type of thing works."

He has the nerve to be bashful, it's unnerving his presence. It causes Olivia to look at the concrete cascade surrounding her. The pastel houses modest, underneath the middle working class agony. They are all alone not in the world but it feels that way. The stars collapsing the entire galaxy lowered for this arrival, her heart is violent.

She nods softly, speechless isn't the word. Her lips have refused her the luxury of spoken word. She wanted to say something beautiful or even thoughtful. It's the inescapable rushing electricity that prickles her skin. Olivia wasn't really sure what was happening to her, the maddening drunkenness of lust and a litany of other sweet emotions. She could not comprehend this. She had read the most pretentious prose filled with arduous words. Toni Morrison she could conquer, but opening to lips was now completely unfathomable notion. His lips will be the death of her that is what she thinks, his stellar teeth. She does not get flustered around pretty boys who leave letters in the dark.

His hips falls in the blades of grass long legs arch in a comforting snug. Their knees touch, kiss, elbows inching closer and closer to the temptation. Their bodies don't have any remembrance fingertips whispering to touch.

Her eyes wander to his honest blue. Her lips open and quiver, there's a long pause before she speaks. "Just tell me the letter meant something. It wasn't a kind of fluke of emotion and now you've come to eat every word back up." She grips the grass in her finger, tugging it from the root.

Fitz shakes his head . "No I'm not heartless. You're this girl and I'm afraid of what I feel because I hardly know you, but I watched you in class, heard your voice . You're kind of everything that makes thunderstorms beautiful."

If she could feel her feet she would run now, she tries to be nonchalant about this. It's just words, but she of all people know that words mean everything. A breath blows out of her mouth before saying, "I'm not sure what to say," she turns to him with an unyielding fascination. It's surreal but also comical what her throat does and the way her fingers slightly sweat. She's never done this, the actual talking to a boy she's attracted to. It's definitely not in that purgatory of she's never held the interest or entice of any horny adolescent boy or predatory man. Men see her but only the stuff that makes her invisible, no voice just pulsing body parts. She doesn't want that and she hasn't gotten desperate enough to be that girl. She isn't the girl either who doesn't know she's beautiful; the mirror is a kind of a perfect foe.

Fitz speaks up, clearing his throat as if preparing for a commanding speech. "You're so quiet, that isn't really you. I read your term paper on Churchill. I'm afraid of you. I think I'll say something stupid and you'll run for the hills."

Olivia drops the books from its perch on her chest, rolling her eyes upward. "I'm not Darth Vader. I can't kill you with my eyes." She stammers, but whispers unflinchingly. "I'm not afraid of you so don't be frightened by me." Scared, amusing and tortured, her eyes bled the nakedness that was much too mesmerizing to endure. They both looked at each other for a swallow of unbelievable seconds and they realized that both of them knew it wasn't them alone anymore on a driving desolate planet. She was isolated and he had the knife in his heart already. Their fingertips did the most audacious thing or rather his did. Inching forward he clutched them tightly in his grasp and he wouldn't let go her knuckles craved this unfamiliar touch, but there was nothing licentious about it.

It goes along easily and if some magical fairy had anything to do with the loveliness of their meeting. The fairy couldn't possibly take all the credit. It was rather that everything was meant to be intrinsically even if the Earth is made of billions of people weeping over romance novels looking for their one true love.

Fitz stomach seizes those terrible butterflies. "What are you reading?" Their heads fall back against the roots of the tree.

"The Bluest Eye," Olivia lifts the book turning it over. "I've read the book a thousand times."  
"What's your favorite part?" He asks.

This is an impossible question she thinks and she's almost angry that it's very easy to tell him, to let him get inside of her head or at least partially because for Fitz it's an innocent question, to her he's screaming "LET ME IN!" LET ME FUCKING IN!"

She took two deep breaths and pulled herself out of her own head.

"Every part holds something that is magical," She says "I'm envious and in love with every written word, but there is the main character Pecola Breedlove. She's a flower and she's got enough sadness to hand out to the whole world and if I close my eyes I'm her." A shiver prickles her spine it is not Fitz's touch, but the burden of memories. The clinging shadows of forgotten time that was glutton for her picture perfect melancholy. It was more than just a book more than just a boy. She gave him a little more than expected, just enough so she wouldn't ache.

Fitz thumb trembles over her wrist; delicate and soft like the night after a lullaby. Her eyelashes fluttered close. The grass prickly on their goose bumps, and forever sweet, the suns ravenous with heat and only the clouds could betray a mist of cool. Helpless, lonely children.

"I think I know what falling in love sounds like." Fitz muttered, deep; just close enough to her ear that she couldn't escape falling apart.

/

/

/

A/N: I was gone for a minute, now I'm back with the jump-off. Let me tell you guys something I've had this nearly complete for months, almost since July. It's been living inside my phone slowly deprecating. For those who don't know this is a former story of mine that I'm re-writing, because Dear God the previous chapters, LAWD! I cringed reading those chapters. Rusty isn't even enough to describe it. Honestly I've had to abandon all that I've written and just re-write the chapters entirely. I have some one-shots that are formulating, gosh it's so hard. I have a stripper/preacher idea roaming inside my head, but if Jesus exists I think he will strike me down for even attempting to write out my thoughts. I hoped you guys like this first chapter.


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